study proves joint attention

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http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100126220331.htm

ScienceDaily (Jan. 27, 2010) — Children as young as five months old

will follow the gaze of an adult towards an object and engage in joint

attention, according to research funded by the Wellcome Trust and the

Medical Research Council. The findings, published January 26 in the

Royal Society's journal Biology Letters, suggest that the human brain

develops this important social skill surprisingly early in infancy.

Joint attention -- where two people share attention to the same object

-- is a vital human social skill necessary for many types of human

behaviour such as teaching, collaboration, and language learning.

Impairments in this skill are one of the earliest signs of autism.

Dr Tobias Grossmann and Professor Mark from Birkbeck,

University of London, used a technique known as 'near infrared

spectroscopy' (NIRS) to examine which areas of an infant's brain are

activated when paying joint attention to an object.

NIRS, an optical brain imaging technique which involves measuring the

blood flow associated with brain activation, is well-suited to study

freely-behaving infants. With this non-invasive technique,

near-infrared light travels from sources on a sensor pad located on

the head, through the skin, skull and underlying brain tissue, and is

then detected by sensitive detectors on the same sensor pad.

In the experiment, conducted in Birkbeck's Babylab, the babies were

shown the computer-animated image of an adult's face. The adult would

make eye contact with the baby, raise her eyebrows and smile, glance

towards an object at her side, back to the baby and then finally turn

her head to face the object. In the control conditions, the adult

would look away from the object or would look at the object without

making eye contact with the baby.

The researchers found that only when the babies engaged in joint

attention with the adult, they used a specific region of their brain

known as the left prefrontal cortex -- an area to the front of the

brain involved in complex cognitive and social behaviours.

" Infants engaged in joint attention use a similar region of their

brain as adults do, " says Dr Grossmann, a Sir Henry Wellcome

Postdoctoral Fellow. " Our study suggests that the infants are tuned to

sharing attention with other humans much earlier than previously

thought. This may be a vital basis for the infant's social development

and learning. "

" In the future this approach could be used to assess individual

differences in infants' responses to joint attention and might, in

combination with other measures, serve as a marker that can help with

an early identification of infants at risk for autism. "